NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover Provides Front-Row Seat to Landing, First Audio Recording of Red Planet
PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 as the spacecraft plummeted, parachuted, and rocketed toward the surface of Mars. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds from Mars.
From the moment of parachute inflation, the camera system covers the entirety of the descent process, showing some of the rover’s intense ride to Mars’ Jezero Crater. The footage from high-definition cameras aboard the spacecraft starts 7 miles (11 kilometers) above the surface, showing the supersonic deployment of the most massive parachute ever sent to another world, and ends with the rover’s touchdown in the crater.
A microphone attached to the rover did not collect usable data during the descent, but the commercial off-the-shelf device survived the highly dynamic descent to the surface and obtained sounds from Jezero Crater on Feb. 20. About 10 seconds into the 60-second recording, a Martian breeze is audible for a few seconds, as are mechanical sounds of the rover operating on the surface.
“For those who wonder how you land on Mars – or why it is so difficult – or how cool it would be to do so – you need look no further,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk. “Perseverance is just getting started, and already has provided some of the most iconic visuals in space exploration history. It reinforces the remarkable level of engineering and precision that is required to build and fly a vehicle to the Red Planet.”
Also released Monday was the mission’s first panorama of the rover’s landing location, taken by the two Navigation Cameras located on its mast. The six-wheeled robotic astrobiologist, the fifth rover the agency has landed on Mars, currently is undergoing an extensive checkout of all its systems and instruments.
“This video of Perseverance’s descent is the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science. “It should become mandatory viewing for young women and men who not only want to explore other worlds and build the spacecraft that will take them there, but also want to be part of the diverse teams achieving all the audacious goals in our future.”
The world’s most intimate view of a Mars landing begins about 230 seconds after the spacecraft entered the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere at 12,500 mph (20,100 kph). The video opens in black, with the camera lens still covered within the parachute compartment. Within less than a second, the spacecraft’s parachute deploys and transforms from a compressed 18-by-26 inch (46-by-66 centimeter) cylinder of nylon, Technora, and Kevlar into a fully inflated 70.5-foot-wide (21.5-meter-wide) canopy – the largest ever sent to Mars. The tens of thousands of pounds of force that the parachute generates in such a short period stresses both the parachute and the vehicle.
“Now we finally have a front-row view to what we call ‘the seven minutes of terror’ while landing on Mars,” said Michael Watkins, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission for the agency. “From the explosive opening of the parachute to the landing rockets’ plume sending dust and debris flying at touchdown, it’s absolutely awe-inspiring.”
The video also captures the heat shield dropping away after protecting Perseverance from scorching temperatures during its entry into the Martian atmosphere. The downward view from the rover sways gently like a pendulum as the descent stage, with Perseverance attached, hangs from the back shell and parachute. The Martian landscape quickly pitches as the descent stage – the rover’s free-flying “jetpack,” which decelerates using rocket engines and then lowers the rover on cables to the surface – breaks free, its eight thrusters engaging to put distance between it and the now-discarded back shell and the parachute.
Then, 80 seconds and 7,000 feet (2,130 meters) later, the cameras capture the descent stage performing the sky crane maneuver over the landing site – the plume of its rocket engines kicking up dust and small rocks that have likely been in place for billions of years.
“We put the EDL camera system onto the spacecraft not only for the opportunity to gain a better understanding of our spacecraft’s performance during entry, descent, and landing, but also because we wanted to take the public along for the ride of a lifetime – landing on the surface of Mars,” said Dave Gruel, lead engineer for Mars 2020 Perseverance’s EDL camera and microphone subsystem at JPL. “We know the public is fascinated with Mars exploration, so we added the EDL Cam microphone to the vehicle because we hoped it could enhance the experience, especially for visually-impaired space fans, and engage and inspire people around the world.”
The footage ends with Perseverance’s aluminum wheels making contact with the surface at 1.61 mph (2.6 kilometers per second), and then pyrotechnically fired blades sever the cables connecting it to the still-hovering descent stage. The descent stage then climbs and accelerates away in the preplanned flyaway maneuver.
“If this were an old Western movie, I’d say the descent stage was our hero riding slowly into the setting Sun, but the heroes are actually back here on Earth,” said Matt Wallace, Mars 2020 Perseverance deputy project manager at JPL. “I’ve been waiting 25 years for the opportunity to see a spacecraft land on Mars. It was worth the wait. Being able to share this with the world is a great moment for our team.”
Five commercial off-the-shelf cameras located on three different spacecraft components collected the imagery. Two cameras on the back shell, which encapsulated the rover on its journey, took pictures of the parachute inflating. A camera on the descent stage provided a downward view – including the top of the rover – while two on the rover chassis offered both upward and downward perspectives.
The rover team continues its initial inspection of Perseverance’s systems and its immediate surroundings. Monday, the team will check out five of the rover’s seven instruments and take the first weather observations with the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer instrument. In the coming days, a 360-degree panorama of Jezero by the Mastcam-Z should be transmitted down, providing the highest resolution look at the road ahead.
More About the Mission
A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
For more about Perseverance:
https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance
and
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020
For more information about NASA’s Mars missions, go to:
To see more images from today’s news release, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/content/images-from-the-perseverance-mars-rover-feb-22-2021-press-briefing
To see images as they come down from the rover and vote on the favorite of the week, go to:
16 responses to “NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover Provides Front-Row Seat to Landing, First Audio Recording of Red Planet”
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2.6 kilometers per hour
Guess they learned from the response to the SpaceX videos that folks like to watch landings as well as launches…
It’s too bad the EDL microphone didn’t work.
More like it took a long time to get really deep computer memories, onchip video compression, and throw away video sensors what would survive the trip to Mars and then work after interplanetary cruse. Yes your phone has had it for 20 years, but your phone spends its life deep under the Van Allen Belts and a full atmosphere. The Russians thought the guys at Glenn Spaceflight Center were being a bunch of weenies too, and look what happened to them with Mars Grunt. I know you like to think the government has been sitting on this for decades and only now decided to fly with it for PR purposes, but that’s not the case.
Not sitting on it, simply deciding the R&D required to harden everything was not worth the effort because of the low science value. Indeed, what scientific value is this video?
Mars Grunt hadn’t been funded yet so it hasn’t had a chance to fail. Fobos-Grunt, never left it’s LEO parking orbit so hardening the electronics wasn’t a factor in its failure, it was due to the Upper Stage failing to fire while still within the protection of the Van Allen Belts.
To the engineers, it’s a goldmine. It’s almost like the jump Space X made with retrieving Falcon boosters instead of just relying on telemetry. It’s high fidelity telemetry where there was no telemetry in the past. Did you know that up until about 2010 the US space space rated space image sensor stock was static, and we were running off old stock from the mid 90’s. Investment in engineering on the civilian space sector was pretty spotty. I was really surprised to see that somone made a interplanetary capable set of electronics to finally provide 1st generation Apple I Phone camera like performance.
That is the function of NASA, to invest in basic engineering technology for civilian spaceflight.
Well, as always there’s a conflict between science and engineering. That the balance does not come out the way YOU want it to come out, does not mean the system is inherently wrong. It just means you are not pleased. Robotic exploration of Mars is evolving at a steady rate and making real progress. We’re already starting to see robotic development of technologies needed for colonization. Yes, it’s not happening at the rate YOU want, but that’s fine.
Actually I see Mars as a detour on space settlement, too far to be of any value, too deep a gravity well, and nothing worth anything when you get there. So it’s OK for NASA to let the scientists play there and stay out of the way of lunar and asteroid settlement.
Space development won’t happen on any of our schedules. Those who live it in the future, will look at our lifetime’s ‘pauses’ the same way we look at the ‘pauses’ that occurred in the Americas. Decades separated major events. And consider the gap between 1492 and the 1660’s. We just mash it all together, future generations won’t consider the gap between Armstrong and SpaceX to be that long. Space is going to keep humbling humanity the more we engage it. Future generations are going to think we were a gifted set of generations when people flew airplanes, programmed computers, and drove their own cars.
In the 50 years following Christoper Columbus Spanish settlements were created throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Peru and Florida, including the first university in the Dominican Republic (1538).
The lag in North American by the British was because Spain had claimed all the Western Hemisphere under the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and England was not strong enough to oppose them until the late 1500’s. After the Treaty of London in 1604 that established “peace”between Spain and U.K. the British settlement of North America was rapid with 11 of the 13 colonies being founded by 1664. The French also founded New France following the breaking of the Spanish monopoly in the New World.
And in the 50 years since Armstrong, we explored all the major planets, discovered that we had no idea what really constituted the solar system, used space to establish planetary communications, discovered with climate really is, reconnaissance, developed planetary radar, interplanetary radar, the list goes on. We’ve hardly been idle. We just haven’t pleased your expectations. You know if we could have done with about 4 or 5 less air craft carrier battle groups, and a fewer wings of B-52’s, maybe didn’t screw up Vietnam, we’d have had more money to do more things. I hope at this point of Starships development curve I hope you realize that the engine and landing technology was completely out of range of any society back then. Falcon was possible in the 80’s given how long its development curve was, we ‘only’ lost 30 years on it. I don’t think we’re doing so bad. We just spun some wild, yet insightful yarns back in the 70’s and it’s going to take about 200 years to live up to them.
Europeans were colonizing the same planet they grew up on with populations they could enslave for nearly free work. We’re going out into a literal vacuum and we have to do all the work ourselves. Our expansion today is mirrored more by the Inuit colonization of the Polar regions than by Europe in the era of exploration.
Private space engineering investment was thin in the 90s because NASA was still actively working to suppress “competition” to its ossifying monopolies. All hail the heroes who fell with Columbia. Their martyrdom on the altar of NASA’s institutional stupidity ended all that suppression and opened the way for private space efforts to supplant state-sponsored ones. That process continues to gain steam by the day.
Do you know that those electronics were space qual’ed in the private sector? I don’t know who did it, I’m asking if you know who did it.
The Moon should be the focus, where all the funding should go for the immediate future. Once we establish a presence there producing hardware, then we can go exploring. Mars is not a good destination. Ceres and the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants are the future.
Mars is a dead end.
Unfortunately that logical strategy is unlikely to happen as too many space scientists have built their careers on studying Mars and they tend to control the science advisory boards. So even though it is really not well suited for human settlement the focus will stay on it.